PILOT
MAKES FATAL CHOICE

Topics: Choices; Goals; Morality; Priorities; Values

Reference: Proverbs 14:12

American Airlines Flight 965 left Miami for Cali, Columbia, in December 1995. Before landing, the pilot of the 757 needed to select the next radio navigation fix, named Rozo. He entered an R into his navigation computer. The computer returned a list of nearby navigation fixes starting with R, and the pilot selected the first of these, whose latitude and longitude appeared to be correct.

Unfortunately, the pilot selected Romeo, 132 miles to the northeast. Following indications on the flight computer, the pilots began an easterly turn and slammed into a granite peak at ten thousand feet. Only 4 of the 156 passengers survived; 152 plus all the crew perished.

The National Transportation Safety Board declared that the crash was due to human error. The navigational aid the pilots were following was valid but not for the landing procedure at Cali. In the literal definition of the phrase, this was indeed human error, because the pilot selected the wrong radio beacon.

The computer told the pilot he was tracking precisely to the beacon he had selected. Unfortunately, it neglected to tell him the beacon he selected was a fatal choice.

—Alan Cooper, The Inmates Are Running the Asylum (SAMS, a division of Macmillan Computer Publishing, 2004)